How BWRT® works

Why understanding a pattern often fails to change it

Most people arriving in therapy already understand a good deal about their own difficulty. They can trace where the anxiety started. They know the fear is out of proportion. They have read about it, thought about it, explained it to friends.

The pattern continues anyway, and this is usually taken as evidence of not trying hard enough.

What is actually happening is a question of timing. Your brain generates a response in a few hundredths of a second, below conscious awareness. Only afterwards does it arrive as something you can notice: a thought, a wave of dread, a sensation in your chest. Insight arrives at the end of that process. The response was generated at the beginning. We cannot work on a response generated at that depth from a cognitive point of view.

What BWRT® does differently

BWRT® stands for BrainWorking Recursive Therapy. It works with those automatic responses at the level where they were laid down, rather than through discussing and reframing them afterwards.

In practice this means you will be asked to bring the difficulty briefly to mind, for a few seconds rather than at length. You will not be asked to narrate what happened, explore it in detail, or relive it. For people who have found previous therapy retraumatising, or who simply do not want to tell the story again, this matters.

The rest of the work is done with your conscious participation, using how you would prefer to respond instead.

Why this is somatic work

Every response your brain generates is felt in the body. Anxiety lives in a chest and a stomach before it becomes anything you could put into words. When a response is generated below conscious awareness, the body registers it first.

Working at the point where the response is generated is therefore body work, whatever it looks like from the outside. It is somatic in mechanism rather than in method: the responses it works with are the ones your body carries.

What will sessions actually look like?

Conversational, with the change work happening somewhere other than the conversation. We will talk about what has been going on and what you want to be different, and then the BWRT® process itself is quite structured and quite brief. You will not be narrating your history at length. Practices do come into it, and they tend to arrive once the underlying response has shifted rather than at the start.

If you come for chronic pain and physical symptoms, and were expecting something closer to coaching, teaching, or a symptom-management programme, say so at the consultation. It is a fair thing to want, I do offer it in my NeuroSomatic Reboot™ programme, and it is better established before we start a therapeutic course than discovered later.

If you came here looking for EMDR

I do not offer EMDR, and people looking for it often find me, which suggests the underlying question is a reasonable one: how do you change a response the brain formed around a difficult experience, when talking about it has not been enough?

EMDR approaches this by working with the traumatic memory directly, using bilateral stimulation while the material is held in mind. It has a substantial research base and is recommended in national treatment guidelines. If you want EMDR specifically, it is worth seeking out a practitioner who offers it, and I am happy to say so.

BWRT® reaches a similar question by a different route, working with the response rather than with the memory content, which is why the process asks so little of you in terms of recall.

What the research currently shows

BWRT® is a young approach and the research on it is at an early stage. I would rather you heard that from me than found it out later.

The most relevant study so far comes from the University of Lincoln. Participants were recruited from an NHS chronic fatigue pathway, and all of them had already completed the standard ten-week group programme and were still struggling. Following BWRT®, the researcher recorded improvements in traumatic stress symptoms, psychological distress and quality of life, alongside physiological signs of reduced arousal. Participants particularly valued how little they had to revisit the memory itself. It was a doctoral case series with six to eight people and no randomised comparison group.

A randomised controlled trial comparing BWRT® with standard trauma treatment is under way at the University of Bergen. At the time of writing it is still recruiting, and results are not expected for some years. I mention it because it exists, not because I can tell you what it will find.

What I can offer you honestly is mechanism and clinical experience: what the approach targets, and what I see in my own practice, which is that clients often describe change happening faster than they expected and with less distress than they were braced for. That is not the same as proof, and you are entitled to hold it as such.

I am registered with The International BWRT® Institute as an Advanced Practitioner and Accredited Trainer, and I work to its code of practice. The Institute sets the training and registration standards for BWRT® practitioners internationally. I have presented case work at the BWRT® Congress in 2024, 2025 and 2026.

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